#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

Mohammed Rasheedi’s wife has just died after forty years of being married to each other. He was much older than she was, but he has outlived her. He has in fact, outlived all of his friends too; he is the last one left. His son and daughter-in-law have happily welcomed him into their house to live, but he does not feel at home. He is lonely and out of sorts.

It is obvious that he does not want to be a burden on his family, and he does not want to impose on their day to day lives. He feels a kinship with the household cat, but that too does not belong to him. What does he have left but fading memories and days alone sitting at the café forgetting to drink his coffee?

This isn’t exactly sad, but it is melancholy and very delicate.

Rating: 9-7-7-7 Total= 30

#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

This is kind of a morbid story. Inside an assisted living home, Ambrosia Manner, Wilma suffers with Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome, a condition with very lively hallucinations. Her manifestations are benign however, and all she sees are little people climbing around her things.

One day there appears outside her window a protest of people wearing baby masks and signs saying “Our Turn.”

“Our Turn is a movement, it’s international, it appears aimed at clearing away what one of the demonstrators refers to as ‘the parasitic dead wood at the top’ and another one terms ‘the dustballs under the bed.”

Old age homes across the world are being attacked and burned to the ground, alleviating the world of an aging population that is selfishly draining resources when they should acknowledge that their time has come. At Ambrosia Manner, they have surrounded the compound, removed the staff and plan on starving them out. When it seems like they plan on escalating the action to arson, Wilma and Tobias head for an adjoining structure hoping to avoid the attack. The Manner burns with them looking on.

Whether this happens for real or whether it’s a manifestation of her Syndrome, it's still pretty morbid. This is the last of this collection. I enjoyed some of it. There being a majority of stories about woman in the advanced stages of their lives, I didn’t find much to connect with personally. I’m not sure I see why the subtitle of this collection calls them “nine wicked tales.”

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#504 Wings- Lorrie Moore

#504 Wings- Lorrie Moore

This story is the perfect depiction of how the world sees generation-x and probably a little how generation-x views itself—or maybe just how I view it. KC and Dench are in a long term relationship, in their late thirties and are going nowhere. Neither is their music career. Their last tour has ended and they are renting an old house and KC is doing some mid life re-evaluating.

“She spent a decade barking up the wrong tree.”

“She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his which was worse.”

While Dench is staying home probably having similar thoughts, KC befriends an old man and finds peace and truth in his presence. She likes the old-fashioned attention he gives her, like the parents she missed. She struggles with what to do from here on out.

The story is a good one, it hits on the right somber notes, not too powerful and not too delicate. The imagery is great, little detail like the old man complaining about age then flashing a smile with “Sepia teeth”…a color usually describing an old photograph.

And of all the movies, books, songs, and random conversations I’ve had over the years, never before has there been a better description of a Generation-X relationship than this one sentence:

“I don’t know what I want…and I don’t know what you’re doing.” AMAZING!!!

As with a lot of Moore’s stories I find this has a little too much “extra” material. There are pages of stuff that would be great for development in a novel, but I find extemporaneous in shorter fiction—but that is just a personal preference. I also get stopped when I come to a phrase like this:

“Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful. Or fruitful with the right fruit.”

It’s nice wordplay, great musical cadence, but it seems like phrase just dropped into the story for its form, and to me feels un-integrated in the flow of the piece. It happens a few times per story where I stop to re-read a passage and wonder why it’s there; They’re not unpleasant, just out of place. It would be like walking in a secluded forest and suddenly coming across a string quarter. That would be a beautiful sight, just not the sight you set out to find...and the rest of your hike you find it hard to enjoy the natural beauty of the forest because you have the string quarter stuck in your mind.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#457 I Dream of Zenia With the Bright Red Teeth - Margaret Atwood

#457 I Dream of Zenia With the Bright Red Teeth - Margaret Atwood

I read the title and immediately thought of the Stephen Foster song: I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, but the title is where the similarities end. Charise, Roz, and Tony are three friends battling their coming middle-age. Each has had mid-life crises symptoms, some of them as innocuous as regressing to watch vampire movies.

“Why are the three of them indulging in these adolescent pursuits…They seem to have thrown away all the maturity and experience and wisdom they’ve collected like Air Miles over their middle years; just tossed them out, in favor of irresponsible buttery and salty munching and cheesy, adrenaline-soaked time wasting.”

Charise however, is having a more serious reaction to aging. She has been having vivid dreams about their deceased friend Zenia. Zenia was the wild-card of their group and one-by-one stole a boyfriend from each of them. Just as the dreams begin, Charise has re-kindled a relationship with Billy, the boyfriend taken by Zenia.

Her new dog, doesn’t like Billy at all, and like an old friend that knows some secrets, does what it can to ward off the dangerous bad decision Charise is about to make.

Notable Passage: “In dreams the time is always now.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31